US Politics isn’t broken, it’s fixed

So there was a businessperson, who ran a company and did very well. Not long after, this person decided they could wield the wisdom of their business smarts in the political arena. 

No, not him. 

We’re referring to Katherine Gehl, a business leader, author, speaker and political innovator who has taken on the ambitious undertaking of trying to reform how politics works in the not-always-so United States of America. 

She did not seem, in a recent hour-long interview, to be remotely delusional. 

One reason she did not seem delusional is because Gehl clearly arrived at her conclusions about what does and doesn’t work in a very systematic, staggered fashion. She didn’t wake up one day and say, “wow, this country’s politics are completely broken.” 

And, here’s the kicker: Gehl does not believe that politics in the U.S. are broken; Gehl believes the system performs exactly as intended. More on that later.

Gehl arrived in a place a little more than a decade ago where she felt politically adrift. She had an early period as a young Republican. Then, a Libertarian stage. Then, more shifting; hailing, as she does, from the Midwest – Gehl grew up outside Milwaukee – she found a home of sorts under the influence of folks such as former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and a former U.S. Senator by the name of Barack Obama who later gravitated upward. 

Her political head swam. “I was,” she admits, “more politically homeless than I knew.” 

In 2022, that sounds quaint and refreshing. Not for Gehl when she passed through what she called the “five stages of political grief.” 

First, she realized things politically were not working well. A fix? She tried to help get candidates – such as the aforementioned Obama – elected.

Then, she focused on Washington and found Congress dysfunctional. There were deficits, government shutdowns, major legislation passed with no crossover appeal (for instance, Obamacare). 

Her third stage involved working on the culture of politics and political discourse. She worked on bridging divides, seeking out issues that connected us. When that proved somewhat futile, she swerved from culture to policy. Fixing the debt problem was something she homed in on, working with CEOs. 

The fourth stage was working on the issue of independent candidates and the problems with getting them elected – or even noticed.  And finally, stage five, the system. As in how the system made it seem that candidates were working against the very people they were elected to serve.

“It has become the party versus the people,” she complained.  She realized that candidates, unfortunately, are incentivized in a manner that blinds them to the beneficence we expect and should demand from our politicians. The next step was to change election rules. 

Katherine Gehl ran Gehl Foods until selling the company in 2015. The company, headquartered just northwest of Milwaukee, had around 350 employees. “It was a fantastic opportunity to work with amazing employees,” she shared about the experience. “It drove me. “Eighty percent of the work I do now is because of the time I spent running a for-profit company,” she continued. “It was through the lens of competitive analysis that I saw there were solutions” to political gridlock. She had her light bulb moment a couple years before she sold the company when she realized that politics was a “uniquely anti-competitive industry.” 

“And the customers,” she concluded, are “deeply pissed off.” 

Gehl describes a “politics industry” driven by five forces, the same five that she says dictate competition in any industry: rivals; buyers; suppliers; the threat of new entrants and the threat of new substitutes. 

She was also moved, earlier, by a love of theatre. Growing up in a small Wisconsin town, her parents would take her to Milwaukee for theatre, dance and the symphony. She later lived in Chicago and went to performances of the famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Later, she was asked by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre to join their board. 

In 2020, with Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, Gehl published The Politics Industry, subtitled How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save our Democracy. Heady stuff indeed. The overarching theme is turning politics into something that actually works for the people politicians are supposed to serve. But the point of the book – and much of our chat – was that politics aren’t broken. The point, as Gehl explained, is that the Constitution’s origins created a set of “determinants of incentives,” and that in Washington, our representatives are simply doing what they are incentivized to do.

“We are not looking to hire new people,” she clarified, again using business speak. “We are looking to change what it takes to gain power.” 

Democracy, she said, “is actually the worst form of government.” That is part of a quote from Winston Churchill who then completed the thought with “except for all the others.” Any wonder we’re stuck in our current quandary? 

Gehl pointed to a picture of the Constitution and exhorted, “look at this. The problem is not in here. What’s written in there is not the problem.” The Senate rule book? It’s even larger than the Constitution. 

I asked Gehl when and if things were better. She pointed to post-World War II America where prosperity reigned, and other advancements placed the U.S. in the position of being the most powerful nation on the planet.

“That position,” she warned, “is being challenged. Over time, the rules of the game have been optimized by the players in that game.” It’s the natural – and unfortunate – progression “when the players regulate themselves. It is the one industry where the players make up the rules of the game.” 

Here in my home state of Pennsylvania, a gubernatorial candidate for this fall’s election wants the legislature to be empowered to overturn elections, effectively trashing the will of the electorate. And we are not alone. Can you imagine the joy in Boston last month if the team could have overturned the scoreboard results of the Celtics’ game six loss to the Warriors? 

And why is there more unrest, if indeed there is? Gehl said it’s because “people are more aware because they became aware their lives were no longer working. Now people are aware that people are trying to monkey with the rules. They are looking at the trajectory of their lives and those of their children. The institutional players have gotten better and more powerful at doing their jobs because of the way the industry is structured.” 

Pissed off at the electoral college? Not happy that twice in this century candidates that did not win the popular vote ascended to the presidency? Gehl advises us not to waste our time. Abiding by the thesis that we should fight the fights that are worth fighting, she said she “wants to spend time on things we can change.” 

And the duopoly, where there seem to be only two candidates standing in elections with any chance of winning? Again, Gehl said not to blame the obvious. 

“There is nothing inherently wrong with having two major players to serve customers,” she explained.  She does think that a viable third candidate would strike fear in the other two and therefore enhance performance. She doesn’t think the two major parties collude intentionally to keep others out. It’s just, she said, “good people trapped in a bad system. They collude on an item-by-item basis.” For instance: fundraising. Any person can contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in an election cycle. But one can only contribute $5,000 to an individual candidate. “How likely will they (the major party candidates) be challenged,” she asked. “They want to stop people from voting.” 

So what to do? Gehl advocates for Final Five voting (FFV). In this system, candidates enter a primary regardless of party. The thought is that this will force candidates to earn a spot in a general election versus a system which, currently, is not competitive. This methodology was devised by Gehl and Porter as part of a 2017 Harvard Business School report on political competition. 

“Eighty-five percent of house races are not competitive,” Gehl explained. “It is fundamentally, massively not democratic! The primaries are a foregone conclusion. The Final Five ensures that no one wins the election before November.”

Gehl further explained that in the current setup, primary winners end up being chosen by around 10% of the electorate. These tend to be the more extreme voters who are telling the people they’ve elected “don’t you dare work with people on the other side.”

Gehl explained that this is not, perceived evidence to the contrary, a new phenomenon. “This happened 100 years ago once the parties realized there was no point playing to the center. We need this to unhappen and return democracy to November voters.” 

Last month in Alaska, Sarah Palin, Nick Begich, Mary Sattler Peltola and Al Gross had the four largest vote counts (Alaska does four, not five) in a special U.S. House race to replace the legendary former Rep. Don Young who passed away in March after serving Alaska’s at-large congressional district for 49 years, a record. Gross then backed out, leaving the other three. Palin, the former governor and Begich, grandson of former U.S. Rep Nick Begich are both republicans; Sattler Peltola, a former state representative, is a Democrat. There were over 40 candidates defeated in the primary including Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Independents. Palin, despite high unfavorable ratings, was the highest vote getter at 27%. 

Alaska approved this system in a 2020 ballot measure. Gehl noted that for the 2024 elections, there are signature drives taking place in Missouri and Nevada. Gehl added that California and Washington adopted top two primaries in which the top two finishers advance to the general election, again, regardless of party affiliation. 

“When elections change, governing changes,” Gehl said to True Thirty founder Joey Dumont during a recent interview. She said that naysayers notwithstanding, the approval rate for California legislators hit 50% by 2016 compared to 10% in 2010. The naysayers came from both sides of the aisle. “Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said ‘I hate the top two,’” Gehl shared. “And Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said ‘it’s not reform, it is terrible.’” To which Congressman Ro Kanna (D-CA) replied, “their bipartisan response should tell you everything you need to know; political parties hate the top-two, so voters should love it.” 

The final step for the general elections is called Ranked-Choice Voting, also known as instant-runoff voting. In this scenario, a candidate cannot win with a simple plurality; the final two candidates standing would then need a runoff so that the winning candidate has won by majority vote. 

Gehl further explained that “Final Five Voting is not a pipe dream. Solving problems is rewarded. FFV is not designed primarily to change who wins but rather to change what those winners are incented to do.” Freed from the fear of being “primaried,” politicians can work across the aisle, deal with trade offs, bargain effectively and find consensus on complex challenges. 

Final Five Voting, she added, would put the focus on November when a much larger percentage of the electorate pays attention and votes; attract a wider, more diverse set of candidates and create accountability through competition. 

Does Gehl think it’s all bad? No, at least compared to where the bar is set. 

“Every country does or will have a politics industry,” she explained. “I’ll still take the U.S. Constitution over other parliamentary systems.”